By Daniel Laurison

While progressives and left-leaning voters are reeling from President Joe Biden’s performance at the June 27 presidential debate, they should not demand that he bow out of the race. In fact, they should not focus solely on Biden. It’s important to remember that campaign professionals of any political party are just as responsible for how we talk and think about our country’s political candidates. Sociologist Daniel Laurison wrote Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Privileged Few Shape Politics for All of Us to give us a behind-the-scenes look at how campaigns influence voter behavior and determine elections. So, what’s the method to the politicos’ madness of running campaigns like Biden’s? This excerpt uncovers the four truths they run on.

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A lot of people who think deeply about American democracy, its flaws and its promise both, have ignored campaigns and the people who run them. So I want to explain why what happens inside campaigns, or in the heads and hearts of campaign professionals, is relevant to understanding American politics. Many political scientists assume that everyone in politics is acting in a fairly straightforward manner to maximize some obvious interest or utility for themselves—that is, they believe in the rational choice theory of human behavior.

I’m not at all convinced by this theory—indeed, most sociologists aren’t. Sure, people sometimes act rationally, but in many situations we do what we do based on a complex mix of factors—our habits, our social conditioning, our desire to adhere to norms and be what we think of as a “good person,” our interest in the respect of our peers, our fears and emotions, and so on. In other words, it’s part of who I am as a sociologist to focus on the fact that people are social beings, not isolated individual calculators of their maximum chance of increasing their utility functions.

If campaign professionals’ actions are geared to one of two obvious external interests, winning or earning, we don’t need to know who they are, or what they think. And if we assume those external interests are what explain campaigns, we miss what’s really happening in American politics, as well as some of the ways it could be different.

Since the people running campaigns are not simply implementing the best possible path to victory, and they’re also not primarily cynically wringing as much money from the process for themselves as they can, what does account for the choices they make? The answer to that question drives the rest of this book, which focuses on four key aspects of the work world of campaign professionals that are essential to understanding how American politics are produced.

First, although campaign professionals absolutely want to win campaigns, most of them are even more concerned with becoming one of the people “in the room where it happens.” To them, this means contributing to decisions about campaign strategy and tactics at as high a level as possible in the campaign structure, on as big a campaign as possible. This is where they can have the most influence, where they’re the closest to the candidate and the power center of the campaign, and where they’ll be given the most credit (or blame) for a win or loss. Reaching this level is the clearest sign that they have “made it” in the political world. In order to gain entry to this inner circle, they need other people in the political world to view them as being good at what they do.

However, because it is so difficult to know which campaign decisions, if any, resulted in a win or a loss, campaign professionals must evaluate each other based on criteria other than the actual effectiveness of their tactics. Data alone cannot tell them how they are doing, but their colleagues and opponents (along with the media) do provide immediate feedback about campaign strategies. It is largely the judgments of other people in politics that matter for politicos’ careers.

Thus, the second key aspect of campaign work is that campaign professionals tend to use two main proxies for good campaigning: the extent to which their colleagues are willing and able to work ridiculously long hours, and their adherence to conventional campaign wisdom passed down among campaign professionals. The consensus about what’s effective in campaigning rarely changes. When it does change, it’s usually because one party has suffered an unexpected loss, and even then the change is so gradual that although new tactics or approaches (such as online advertising) may gain prominence, older ones—even those shown to be entirely ineffective (such as glossy mailers)—remain. “Best practices” in campaigns are largely learned on the job: a few universities offer certificate or MA programs dedicated to teaching campaign skills, but most politicos I spoke with thought these were “nearly worthless.” When I asked campaigners what made something a good move in a campaign, they rarely mentioned research or evidence, and instead were much more likely to talk about having a “gut sense” for politics or to say, “You just know it when you see it.”

Third, in part because of the use of these proxies, the world of campaign professionals is very insular. It is hard to get even an entry-level position on most campaigns if you do not already know someone involved in politics, and it is difficult to advance if you do not have both the time and financial security to volunteer or work for very little pay for a campaign that may or may not lead to a next job. This is part of why campaign professionals are overwhelmingly men, generally from middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds, and disproportionately White. This last is true even when you compare within parties. Democratic campaign professionals are more racially diverse than Republicans, but they are less likely to be Black, Latinx, Asian American, Pacific Islander, or Native American than Democratic voters are. The same holds for Republicans. This might not matter if campaigns were simply implementing straightforwardly knowable best practices. But given that those aren’t available, this insularity limits the variety of strategies and tactics campaigns might take on, as well as their ability to understand and relate to Americans who are socially distant from the political elite in Washington, DC.

Which brings us to the fourth important consequence of the uncertainty of campaign strategies: a reductive view of voters and their behavior. Tellingly, campaign professionals I interviewed rarely brought up potential voters when I asked about campaign quality. When they did talk about voters, they usually described them as an audience, as passive (if not resistant) recipients of campaign messaging. Campaign professionals even discussed the need to “hit people over their heads” or “pound into them” the campaign’s message.

This is because, aside from low-level field operatives and event managers, senior politicos rarely interact with the potential voters they are trying to influence. Instead, their understanding of voters is filtered through polls and the modeling done with voter data, combined with their prior beliefs about the right way to campaign. As if to illustrate this point, one key player in the Clinton 2016 campaign told me that they’d made all the right decisions, but simply based them on the wrong data. I heard from a number of people that the campaign headquarters ignored reports from local campaign staff whose interactions with voters indicated that the reality on the ground was different from what the models predicted. This data- and modeling-driven approach to understanding voters leads campaign professionals to think of them as abstract conglomerations of attributes and data points, rather than as members of families or communities, or actual complex people with whom they could connect.

These four key truths about modern-day campaign workers—their focus on being “in the room,” their adherence to conventional wisdom, the exclusiveness of their world, and their approach to voters as variables—mean that in our current system, campaigns are spending huge sums of money to do things that may not be entirely effective at achieving their goal. Politicos tend to see campaigning as a battle between teams as much as or more than an effort to really connect their candidate with potential voters. Consequently, they are missing an opportunity to include people in democracy in a meaningful way.

Campaign professionals are doing work that they believe is deeply important and, simultaneously, might not matter at all. To resolve this tension, they focus on their colleagues, their opponents, and the media. In the end, the all-consuming nature of campaigns serves to exclude people who cannot or will not give up everything else in their lives for the sake of the campaign. All this dedication and devotion isolates campaign professionals—and campaign operations—making it even harder for outsiders to make sense of their work and its implications for American democracy.

About the Author 

Daniel Laurison is an associate professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, the associate editor of the British Journal of Sociology, and a Carnegie Fellow. He researches and writes on social class and political inequalities. He coauthored The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged with Sam Friedman and is the author of Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Privileged Few Shape Politics for All of Us.